It’s well worth making the trip to the Design Museum once a year for their annual celebration of the most original and exciting products, concepts and designers in the world today.
The thought provoking exhibition explores how the future is fast becoming the present with newly-developed materials, innovative ways of managing scarce resources, playful designs for all ages and local communities claiming new spaces for themselves.
Here are a few of our highlights:
EXCAVATION: Evicted
London based artist and designer Paul Cocksedge produced a fascinating series of furniture pieces built with materials extracted from his studio floor. Cocksedge started drilling into the floor of the Hackney building after finding out he was going to be evicted, and the site transformed into luxury flats – an increasingly common story in London and other major cities around the world.
Once he’d assembled a team of people to help, Cocksedge removed hundreds of cylinders of concrete, discovering the Victorian bricks from the building’s former life as a stable along the way. After sanding, polishing and cutting the cores, Cocksedge incorporated their circular forms into a series of six pieces that contrasted the coarseness of the concrete with the lightness of glass. For the final piece in the collection, Cocksedge suspended leftover discs in glass and resin to form a table that exposes the unexpected internal patterns of the material.
“By creating pieces from the very fabric of my own studio, I hope to remind of the transient nature of both creative workers, and the places they inhabit,” says Cocksedge.
Bad News
Addressing a key problem of our time, the Bad News computer game was created as a tool for people to build resistance to disinformation. The game was designed by DROG; a team of academics, journalists and media-experts headquartered in The Hague along with researchers at Cambridge University. In Bad News you take on the role of fake news-monger. As the designers explain:
“Be set to drop all pretence of ethics and choose the path that builds your persona as an unscrupulous media magnate. But keep an eye on your ‘followers’ and ‘credibility’ meters. Your task is to get as many followers as you can while slowly building up fake credibility as a news site. But watch out: you lose if you tell obvious lies or disappoint your supporters!”
Players are taken through six key strategies of disinformation: impersonation, emotion, polarisation, conspiracy, discredit and trolling.
The team behind Bad News hope that by breaking down the fake news process and exploring its inner workings people’s resistance to disinformation and manipulation will increase and they’ll be able to spot fake news for what it truly is.
Trash Isles
An accumulation of plastic waste covering an area the size of France is currently floating across the Pacific Ocean – though little is currently being done to address it, as it occupies international waters. Involving the creation of a ‘national identity’ complete with passports, stamps and currency, the Trash Isles campaign was launched by the Plastic Ocean Foundation (in conjunction with LADbible) to enlist citizen ‘petitioners’ to persuade the United Nations to recognise the waterborne mass of debris an official country, thus forcing the global community to deal with it as a member of the UN Environmental Charter.
